BARRIO LOGAN: CLASH OF CULTURES
NEXT STEPS IN THE BARRIO LOGAN STANDOFF

City Council voting to repeal plan or send it to citywide ballot
Council set to take action on community plan that would restrict industrial uses

Walk along Newton Avenue in Barrio Logan and you can’t help but be startled by the contrasts.

To the north are houses, including a brightly painted Victorian, and apartments.

To the south are warehouses, chemical yards and maritime businesses.

In some places houses sit next to industry.

It’s an unstable standoff that is heading for City Council action Tuesday.

That’s when a petition circulated by the shipyards and their suppliers will either result in the repeal of a new community plan approved in September or its placement on the June ballot for a citywide vote.

The nearly 5,000 residents in the 1,000-acre community in the shadow of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge outnumber industry. They want safer streets and sidewalks, better schools and parks, all the things every other neighborhood desires.

“Now is the time for the city to help us out to have a better quality of life after so many years of being neglected,” said Hector Villegas, 36, who has lived among the industrial companies all his life on Newton Avenue.

But the maritime industry is fighting equally hard to remain near the shipbuilders and the San Diego Naval Base.

“Of course, my feeling would be that this thing should be industrial down there,” said Henry Beauloy, whose Carlson & Beauloy compressor equipment company has been located two doors east of Villegas’ home since 1955.

While the Barrio Logan plan concerns only a small corner of San Diego, the precedent of a ballot challenge could reverberate elsewhere as San Diego’s other 50-plus community plans undergo revision. Losers in these perennial land-use battles could take the same route by collecting some 33,000 registered voters’ signatures in a series of referendum battles.

The barrio plan, five years in the making, would do what its 1978 predecessor failed to do — separate industry from housing, particularly in a five-block buffer zone where Villegas lives and Beauloy works.

Over the next 20 years, the plan would provide for a 182 percent increase in the population and 26 percent reduction in industrially zoned land. Commercial acreage would go from 25.9 acres to 98.4 acres.

The plan doesn’t affect existing uses but any growth would be restricted in the zone and conditional permits and other regulations would make industrial expansion problematic, shipyard industry leaders say.

The dividing lines are clear and irreconcilable.

“I love this area — I could never do this any other place,” said Raymond Licon, 78, a retired Macy’s merchandising employee. He paints and putters in the garden of his immaculately maintained home on the eastern section of Newton Avenue where he has lived since 1950.

The shipbuilding industry and Navy want to stay as well, arguing that high-paying jobs and national defense should trump neighborhood preferences. The plan calls for new transportation improvements, not yet calculated, to reduce truck traffic on neighborhood surface streets and route them more directly from the waterfront to the freeways.

Larry Blumberg, executive director of the San Diego Military Advisory Council, said the Navy does not want to speak publicly about the plan, but he thinks the pressures to replace industry with housing will make it ever harder to service the shipyards and Navy.

“This is not a fiction — it’s a real issue,” he said.

Who was there first is perhaps irrelevant. The question is what to do today.

Some residents, such as longtime activist Rachael Ortiz, executive director of the Barrio Station social service nonprofit, didn’t think a new plan was needed, especially one that removes some residentially zoned land.

The area’s councilman, David Alvarez, who grew up in the barrio and now is running for mayor, tried to wall off industry and housing by fashioning a last-minute compromise, backed by his four fellow Democrats on the council on Sept. 17. His five-block buffer zone bounded by Newton, Evans, Main and 26th streets, would permit only commercial and office uses, while allowing existing businesses and homes to remain under certain restrictions. His opponent, Councilman Kevin Faulconer and his three Republican colleagues sided with industry and voted against the plan.

The Port of San Diego Ship Repair Association launched the referendum drive and the Environmental Health Coalition retaliated with a lawsuit challenging the validity of the petitions that contained more than 53,000 signatures, 20,000 more than required. A second referendum to repeal the implementing ordinances is set for council action Tuesday as well.

“What we want to do is improve the health and safety of the community,” said Diane Takvorian, executive director of the health coalition. “That’s our end goal.”

But Matt Carr, head of California Marine Cleaning, whose 150 employees on Main Street clean bilges, holding tanks and other spaces on the ships, characterized Takvorian’s approach as a sneak attack because the steering committee that drafted the plan had many more residents than industry representatives.

“Where does it stop, at the 32nd Street Naval Station?” he asked. “I think the industry woke up to what’s going on, it’s organizing and fighting the good fight.”

Some industrial and shipyard workers live in Barrio Logan and naturally are conflicted about what is more important, their jobs or their community.

Fidel Angel Garcia, 62, is a retired and semi-disabled shipyard worker who has lived in the barrio for 40 years. He remembers the problems stemming from traffic, hazardous contaminants and lead-based paint. To move away would mean younger generations could not enjoy the close-knit Hispanic community that comprises 73 percent of the population, he said.

“For them, it’s very expensive to move,” he said of the shipyards. “For us, the poor, it’s more expensive.”

David Duea, 75, who owns Fire Etc., a firefighting supply warehouse, had to move once before from the Petco ballpark district and thought his new location in a Quonset hut on Main Street would work.

“It’s a great area because you’re close to the shipyards,” he said.

But industry isn’t compatible with housing.

“The fact that they want to have residential in this area is great,” he said, “because your grandmother or great-grandmother lived here. I love all that history... Things change. We take away this industrial area, and where could I go? I’d have to go to Otay Mesa. This is such precious industrial land that we should invest in this area as an industrial location, close to the port, close to North Island, three shipyards, the Navy. It’s a no-brainer.”

Former city planner Mike Stepner, now a professor at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design and who was involved in crafting the 1978 community plan, said the conflicts could not be resolved back then.

The city had intended for the barrio to be all industrial after Interstate 5 was built in 1963 and the San Diego-Coronado Bridge in 1969, Stepner said. But the residents remained and now, as downtown has been redeveloped and rents and prices have skyrocketed, artists and other urban pioneers have moved into Barrio Logan. The neighborhood is revitalizing and gentrifying, not deteriorating.

“Cities are fluid, neighborhoods change and some places change faster than others,” he said. “You can do your damnedest to try and prevent some of that (industrial-residential conflict) and you need to, but you have to work with it.”